@ErrataRob This is more than a proxy war because the Ukrainians are more than just our proxies. Granted, our interests on this intersect massively with those of Ukraine, but the Ukrainians are far too independent actors to be regarded as purely proxies (similarly the UK was not a US proxy from '39-'41 though our interests did significantly align and we provided them a lot of equipment).

@cvwise Dark humor, but now they can charge users to turn it off or allow it to be turned off in a "premium" or "enterprise" grade version of Windows.

@josh I'm pretty sure this is untrue. There's a lot of debate about how to capture telecom economy of scale but it's safe to say that it does exist. Your sentence appears to imply that an exponential cost function for infrastructure applies (i.e. cost = infrastructure ^ x where x > 1) yet this does not appear to be the case in reality. At least at some levels of scale, infrastructure appears to scale at far below this level, making economy of scale a thing.

@josh I'm having trouble finding this in the '73 AT&T "The Far Sound" are you sure it came from there? Additionally, this is not an accurate representation of the telephone network as the telephone network is hierarchically switched, not mesh. Because of this, the assertions about how telecom networks scale are wrong: problems of scale are managed through hierarchical switching systems in which higher level exchanges (higher level switches aggregating connectivity to keep low-demand, high-cost circuits at manageable levels). It's also worth noting that all this telephony is at a higher level of abstraction than the physical layer (which has its own hierarchical structure) you seem to be reasoning about here. I think you need more knowledge of telecommunications to use this analogy effectively to reason about other phenomena.

@happygeek No problem, was away from my computer and I've not yet settled upon a mobile app for Mastodon. Threat modelling is crucial to making good decisions about security. Sorry to hear you have COVID and may you have an easy time of it!

@happygeek Thanks, I may pass this to some people I know looking at dipping their toes in the Mastodon end of the fediverse pool. I strongly dislike the phrase "secure social network." It doesn't seem like there would be any kind of consensus on what this actually means: Twitter was fairly good at traditional account security processes but their (or any other major provider's) security when it came to the actual social network aspect of the service was meh. Even the core concepts of how to secure the social aspect of social networks are in very early stages (standards for what authentication even means are fuzzy while we're still figuring out how on earth to approach black and grey propaganda even when it's identified).

@ErrataRob The self in third person thing strikes me as being emblematic of a really weird perspective. The slip of the tongue is amusing but not really significant.

@davidgerard You had me going there until "GNU copypastas"

@dangillmor A Twitter replacement run by a Unit 8200 alumnus should be interesting.